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Category Archives: Barbarians

Primal Liberty

Saturday, August 2, 2008

It has been suggested that the Indian depicted on the bottom right of the frontispiece to Thomas Hobbes’ De Cive – the representation of primal libertas – was inspired by John White’s watercolors. Below is Plate 48 from America 1585: The Complete Drawings of John White edited by Paul Hulton (U. North Carolina Press and [...]

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Barbarians, Old and New

Saturday, April 28, 2007

On May 19th at 9:00 AM in a room yet to be announced, I’ll be giving the first public presentation on my work on barbarians and savages, drawing upon Hobbes and Montesquieu as examples. Apparently my session is entitled “Fundamentalisms” (I’m not sure why!) as one other person is doing a paper on Israeli fundamentalism [...]

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Hobbes

Monday, April 16, 2007

I’ve been working through Hobbes over and over again the past few weeks – his political writings and a number of commentaries. (The imbrication of rational choice/game theoretic and analytic philosophy – i.e., Gauthier, Kavka, Hampton, etc – is especially infuriating; but that is another discussion. Suffice to say, I find it problematic how (1) [...]

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Dissertation

Friday, February 16, 2007

Now that my proposal has been accepted, I need to begin working on the dissertation proper. My biggest fear heading into this project – the evidence being derived from my comprehensives and the proposal itself – is that the final product will become overwrought; that I’ll refuse to let it go. Last night I was [...]

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Dissertation Proposal

Sunday, January 21, 2007

One title page, two epigraphs (Walter Benjamin and Constantine Cavafy), five sections, seventeen footnotes, fourteen pages of prose, seven pages of bibliography itself divided into three sections… pending approval by committee (hopefully by email rather than meeting), my revised proposal is complete. New title: Savages, Barbarians and Citizen-Subjects. Forthcoming in late 2008 or early 2009. [...]

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Cavafy: “Waiting for the Barbarians”

Friday, January 12, 2007

Constatine Cavafy’s poem, “Waiting for the Barbarians,” is below the fold. Evidently the inspiration for Coetzee’s novel of the same name.

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Nietzsche: BGE 257

Monday, January 8, 2007

Section 257 of Part Nine, “What is Noble?”, from Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil. Every enhancement of the type ‘man’ has so far been the work of an aristocratic society – and it will be so again and again – a society that believes in the long ladder of an order of rank and differences [...]

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Benjamin: “The Destructive Character”

Friday, January 5, 2007

First in an occasional series: documents in barbarism. Walter Benjamin’s “The Destructive Character” below the fold.

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